Category — Engaging your audience

OK, that might be overselling it. But just a bit. It’s early in the morning and I needed to get your attention.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “I have a dream,” not “I have a plan.” That’s what caught MY attention about Simon Sinek’s TEDx talk.

At On Your Feet, we’re big believers in saying what’s real. (Life is complex enough already, right?) When we get a question from an audience that we can’t answer, we just… uh… say we don’t have the answer. And then do our best to help them find it.

That said, Jonah Lehrer, contributing editor at  Wired and author of the blog, The Frontal Cortex, was recently part of OHSU’s brain lecture series here in Portland. He was lecturing to a full auditorium about his new book, How We Decide, when someone from the audience asked a really tough one, about brain chemistry. I loved his answer and am adding it to my own back pocket: [Read more →]

By being unrealistic and crunched for time, I recently discovered a new way to start a follow-up meeting.

The session had been rescheduled several times. Stragglers were making us late and, frankly, I was getting irritated. Because I’m a champion eavesdropper, it was easy to overhear that the team’s memory of our last meeting was dim – and the commitments they left with, then sincere, were now even foggier. Layoffs, the holidays, countless other distractions in the interim… I needed to get them on the same page and focused, fast. Foolishly, I hadn’t built in time to do it.

All I could think of was to make them do it for me.

“Imagine this spot,”  I said, walking to one side of the room, ”is 5:00pm on November 17th – the moment we walked out of our last meeting.” [Read more →]